Category Archives: Hardware

3 days later, my mouser order arrived to Japan (this is super fast), I got the relays, desoldered the bad one (proper desoldering tool is very useful here).

(Right is new replaced, left is the old one for comparison, didn’t take it apart though).

Soldered the replacement and couple of screws later, I had the multimeter repaired, reassembled and ready to test.

(Don’t forget to note colors of the internal cables connected to the rear panel posts)

First I realised that once or twice another test had failed (500.2), and also 600.1 and 601.2 (which was definitely a change from original 600.1,600.2,601.1).

When the test process asks for 4-wire short I literally used a 4-wire kelvin clips shorted, and this seems to be the reason why error 500.1 came up, and likely the 600.x ones now were because I shorted HI to LOW instead of AMPS.

Now, for 4-wire short I used pomona banana leads (I think 12-ich ones) to get as close to a “real” Keithley 4-wire short brace (it’s literally a brace with 4 banana plugs that snaps right into the posts).

After the change of leads – all of the tests succeed. Voila, I repaired the multimeter (but I think I will someday make a a 4-wire short brace for reliable testing).

I wanted my Commodore 64 to be able to serve as a serial terminal, but the built-in serial port has extremely low speed.

I found this project, called UART Cartridge, and I knew this is it, of course those carts are not possible to buy, I had to make them myself, so I got to work.

I’ve ordered the PCB’s, all the parts (some still haven’t arrived so I had to find alternative source), and built the first cart already.

The result is amazing, the cart looks great and works really well as well.

I’ve been using my C64 on a Dell U2410 monitor over Composite cable, and the result wasn’t very good,

as much as games look okay scaled, the small very sharp font doesn’t stretch well, so I had to look for other solutions.

First, I tried Japan-made EntaVision S-Video->VGA converter, with mixed results, the font is more readable but somehow it doesn’t handle interlacing well and everything looks jittery.

Then, I tried “UP Empire SD-CSH1” S-Video -> HDMI converter and the result is much better, the font is very readable, although on my Monitor I can’t adjust the 720p/1080p picture to 4:3 aspect ratio, well, with such a small font it might be even better to keep it stretched – makes it even more readable.

The schematics and design was done by Dennis Kuschel, and are available on his website:

http://mycpu.selfhost.it/otherprojects/c64terminal/index.htm

I have enough parts to make a few more of those carts (and another part order pending), and will happily do so if you’re interested.

I would ship from Japan, it seems that worldwide shipping ranges between $4 and $8 depending on the speed.

Please contact me if you’d like to place an order (for tracking purposes I would recommend registering on my blog and placing a comment – also that other folks can see what is the demand).

Cost for a single unit : $40

Cost for 2-5 units: $35 each

Waiting time from placing an order to shipment – 2-4 weeks (although I will try to keep a small stock of ready-made carts or at least part sets for immediate assembly).

Please note that *your* cartridge may look different, due to supply of certain parts, some of them may be substituted for others.

The cartridges are fully tested on a PAL (EU) Commodore 64.

I have verified that the software itself works on an NTSC Commodore 64 with help of an emulator (VICE), there is no 100% guarantee that it will work on an actual NTSC C64 – and I will not accept returns should that be the case.

While waiting for my Octane2 to arrive, I started preparations and made myself a 13W3 to DSUB Adapter.

There are plenty of adapters on the market, but most of them are either:

wrong way (to use 13W3 monitor with VGA Video card)

SUN-specific (some of them work with older SGI machines, but due to wrong routing of a couple signals, those do not work with newer machines like Octane)

There are (but difficult to find) SGI-specific adapters with only A1,A2,A3 signals routed.

So, what to do – there are usually few options:

Buy SUN adapter, and modify it to work (this usually involves dissecting the molded plug and rerouting some cables inside).

Buy a 13W3 -> BNC adapter, along with BNC -> VGA (that’s the best solution if you have monitor with BNC).

Make your own :)

Being a DIY guy, I decided to sacrifice some cheap old VGA cable I found in the box, bought a couple of 13W3 plugs with mini-BNC’s and started soldering. I was actually surprised I could buy 13W3 plugs, sockets and those mini-BNC’s with no problem at all (I did have to ask the clerk for more because the boxes in the store were empty – they had a bunch in stock – if I recall, 100 JPY for each mini-BNC + 300 JPY for the plug).

The operation is fairly simple:

Strip off the D-SUB cable on one end – if it’s molded be careful not to cut yourself – there will probably be metal shielding which really likes to cut your fingertips :P (which hurts A LOT).

Find out which cables are for R,G,B and their shielding – even my cheap cable had them clearly separated each with it’s own shielding (if yours doesn’t – throw it away and buy another one – you won’t get good picture without each color properly shielded), Red had pink color, Blue was Blue, and Green was white – so finding out what is what wasn’t hard either.

Put BNC protective caps first and strip off the shielding from each of those 3 cables. My cable had foil with outer plastic wrapping on each.

Make sure you have the caps – otherwise you will end up desoldering and probably melting the cable.

Do you really have the caps on ?

Solder the signal cables into 13W3 mini-BNC’s, then wrap the shielding around nicely and solder into each BNC outer casing,

You may need to file the shielding solder nice and round so that cap has snug fit – if you do itwell, it will fit all the way with a little click at the end.

I didn’t buy the plastic enclosure yet, looking at dimensions of my plug, any DB25 sized should work.

My small advice – DO NOT insert mini-BNC’s into the plug (I was tempted and this made it a bit harder, also you can’t remove it once it’s in place), solder them while loose.

Use third hand – if you do put mini-BNC’s into the plug – they rotate which just makes it harder.

At every step, make sure you didn’t melt signal’s isolation and there is no short between any of the pins.

Once you’re done, verify the cable:

A1 (RED) signal should lead to pin 1 (top left) on the DSUB.

A1 (RED) shielding should lead to pin 6 (middle row left) on the DSUB.

A2 (GREEN) signal should lead to pin 2 (top 2nd from the left) on the DSUB.

A2 (GREEN) shielding should lead to pin 7 (middle row 2nd from the left) on the DSUB.

A3 (BLUE) signal should lead to pin 3 (top 3rd from the left) on the DSUB.

A3 (BLUE) shielding should lead to pin 8 (middle row 3rd from the left) on the DSUB.

That’s all – 3 shielded cables should to the trick.

In addition, I would also recommend soldering cable’s outer shielding into the metal casing of the plug. (If you don’t – it will probably work, but you will end up with some interference.)

If you fancy (or if you monitor doesn’t support Sync-On-Green), you may need to solder Sync signals into respective ports (I didn’t need to, and this has not been confirmed to work):

Pin 3 – C. Sync / Gnd goes to pin 10 on DSUB

Pin 4 – H. Sync goes to pin 13 on DSUB

Pin 5 – V. Sync goes to pin 14 on DSUB

Some pictures below:

13W3 plugs:

Male plug: this is what goes on your cable.

Note order of BNC: from the left (Blue)A3, (Green)A2, (Red)A1

Female socket – this is what your SGI Workstation already has.

Note order of BNC: from the left (Red)A1, Green(A2), Blue(A3)

Mini-BNC: this is what goes into your plug assembly – you can see the inner soldering point. Please also note the latch – once you insert into the assembly it’s permanent.

And the front

This is how the protective cap looks like – put it on the signal cable BEFORE soldering, and then after filing the outer solder a bit – push to fit – it should click, there’s no need to solder the cap together with the BNC.

The below is the MALE part – this is what your Workstation already has.

So, i went to Google Developer Day 2009 last tuesday and got free HTC Magic GDD2009 phone – limited edition.
It’s very cool toy, has everything i need, but as usual here, MMS/Mail does not work when using normal cellphone SIM card.

The Story:

Here, in Japan, people use E-mails to communicate (more popular than SMS), but these are not ‘real’ emails – these are MMS’s converted to emails on the fly by provider.
So, by sending email to addres xx@softbank.ne.jp, their server will find who is recipient and convert it to MMS, sending to this person.
Vice-versa, by sending email from phone, it actually is MMS that you send, and provider will convert it to e-mail outside the network.

The way MMS receiving works: special SMS comes to the phone, it contains first 1024 bytes of message and some data instructing it to download the rest – this remaining part is being downloaded via standard HTTP protocol, but this is when problem starts – Softbank blocks HTTP User-Agent of unknown phones (not being sold by them).

Another (and the most annoying) problem i encountered, is the android device itself, the edition i have, does not support sending MMS at all.

Solutions:

Step 1:

Make backup of your current device (you can skip it if you’re too lazy or confident ;-) ):

Then, once you have the file on SD card, reboot your android, and while it starts keep “BACK” and “POWER” pressed – android will enter fastboot mode, then type:

fastboot boot recovery-new.img

Your android will run this recovery image which allows you few things, like update from sdcard, make backup etc.

Choose the option to backup nandroid.
It will place backup of your current device onto the SD card – might be worth keeping :-).

YOU DO NOT need to ‘root the magic’ or do any other steps from this instructions – these steps are for other purposes, not applicable here.

—

Step 2:

Making android support MMS (if your provider does not block user agent this is the only and final step):

This will flash your device to the same version as Google IO event, you get few features like Voice synthesis (voice search and voice dial), Amazon MP3 access – these are not present in Japanese version.
But, the drawback is – You will not have Japanese language support anymore.

First, make sure you really need to enable MMS, go to Messaging application, start typing, and press menu, if you DO NOT have options lile ‘add subject’, ‘attach’ – then you DO need it.

You DO NOT need worry that instructions is for Google IO edition and not GDDC09 – these phones are in fact different but there are ways around it.

I recommend using fastboot method (its not at all hard),

You will need to downlaod fastboot binary (available at HTC), and 2 of these images: Radio Image and System Image.

Follow instructions for Radio Image installation, most likely your device will boot after it completes but you will get permanent android starting logo,
please have your USB cable connected and adb showing logging – you will see that it tries to boot all over again – THIS IS OK – no need to panic.

Place radio image onto your card by typing:

adb push <radio-image-package>.zip /sdcard/update.zip
adb shell sync

Boot into recovery mode by holding HOME while it reboots, Then choose ALT+s on the screen, next HOME+BACK, device should reboot, it might not start at this point by just showing you android logo – this is ok, no need to panic…

Once you have radio package downloaded and flashed , time to flash it with system image – this is little tricky:

Push the image onto SD card:adb push <system-image-package>.zip /sdcard/update.zip
adb shell syncBoot into Fastboot (BACK+POWER while you start it) – MAKE NOTE OF ‘hboot’ version – you will need it very shortly.

You can safely try to flash system image, but it will fail due to incompatible HBOOT version (they require 1.33.3004, and you have probably 1.33.3005).
No need to worry here, we can make it happen :-).

So, what you need to do, is to UNPACK your system image to a folder, edit the file android-info.txt, change the require version-bootloader to your hboot version (1.33.3005 most likely), save it, and compress all the files in this directory into new zip file (all of them need to be in the ‘root’ of zipfile).

So, now you have compatible system image that will work well on your device, try flashing it now, DO NOT FORGET to select options to clean userdata and cache – this is required, without it, your device will boot only to android logo and keep hanging there.

—

Step 3:

Modifying User-Agent string in the MMS client (this *MAY* be enough to complete only this step and it might as well make your device support MMS’s – i have done all steps though):
(GGDC09 version has MMS disabled, and i am not sure whether just changing MMS app is enough to enable this).

Further work: change more of android source, to have nice settings under MMS app, to edit UserAgent :-D.

Enjoy :-)

——-

UPDATE!!!

Thanks to Roberto Jung Drebes , now i know that there’s no need to flash GGDC09 with anything to get MMS working, all it takes is to use my MMS.app (or compile your own) – just the way i suspected.

Also, he found that setting apn type as ‘mms’ – doesn’t work unless you already have other apn with type ‘default’ – this way it works very well. Good way to ensure you don’t end up with huge phone bill due to data transfer…